A Conspiracy of Data

QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2414331
AutoresMatthew N Hannah (0000-0002-9060-4427, Purdue University West Lafayette, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen7
Número3
Fecha de publicación2021-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSocial Media + Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2056-3051 • E-ISSN: 2056-3051
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/20563051211036064
OpenAlexW3193512543
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas21
Referencias citadas16

Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. In our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. We live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. Despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. I argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. Deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. QAnon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the Internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. I argue that QAnon's success-indeed, its very existence-relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) QAnon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by Q and Q's anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) QAnon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points

Computer security · Data science · Disinformation · Information visualization · Internet privacy · Misinformation · Social media · The Internet · Visualization · World Wide Web · Computational Physics and Python Applications · Computer Science · Data Visualization and Analytics · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence